Chapter Three

The Doctor and Benny mingled with the group, careful to remember their objective. Casually, the Doctor glanced at a map of the building hanging from one wall. Disguising it as a yawn, he managed to indicate to his companion where they needed to head next. As soon as possible, they extricated themselves and stepped through into the Main Hall.

An actual Mars Probe hung suspended in mid-air twenty feet above their heads. The hall was vast, but gleaming and white, packed with artefacts from the international space programmes of the nineteen-seventies. They walked past the scale models, the photographs and the display case featuring the 'Astronaut's Survival Kit'. Benny paused at the full-sized mock-up of the inside of an old space capsule. It was cramped, of course, but the thing that struck her was how old-fashioned it was: the displays were mechanical, not LED or even digital, the controls were clunky switches, the computer that took up half the room wouldn't have been powerful enough to run the average washing machine even now, a couple of decades later. It was an object that belonged to the era of the eight-track cartridge, nylon slacks and the Ford Capri. This wasn't the retro-futurism of the TARDIS, with its incomprehensible forces hiding behind a Jules Verne veneer: this was the real thing.

The sound of the sonic screwdriver interrupted her train of thought.

The Doctor was bent over a display case, prising off the glass cover. The alarms hadn't gone off, but neither of them were exactly inconspicuous in their outfits. Benny strode across the room, and saw the Doctor scraping up some red dust into an empty test tube.

'Martian soil,' he announced by way of explanation.

'Yes, I know.'

The Doctor closed the case, sealing it up again. The test tube had already disappeared into the depths of his frock coat. 'Caldwell was concerned about the soil, remember?'

'Yes.'

'Look at this case, though. There's pounds of the stuff, on public display.'

'It's still in limited supply. It would cost hundreds of millions of pounds to get any more.'